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| - A camp in northeastern Mali housing UN, French and Malian troops fighting jihadist insurgents came under shell fire on Tuesday, but there were no casualties or damage, the United Nations mission MINUSMA said. Sixteen rounds were fired at the Tessalit camp in Kidal region near the Algerian border, but all fell outside its perimeter, MINUSMA spokesman Olivier Salgado said. In January, 18 UN troops and two civilians were wounded in a mortar attack on the same camp. On Monday, three MINUSMA troops were injured, one seriously, when their convoy struck a road mine in the Kidal region, the mission said. Northern Mali is the starting point of a jihadist insurgency that began in 2012 and has since spread to the centre of the country and neighbouring Niger and Burkina Faso. Thousands of people have been killed, hundreds of thousands of others have fled their homes and the economies of the three countries, already among the poorest in the world, have been devastated. MINUSMA has 13,000 troops in Mali, while France has 5,100 soldiers in Operation Barkhane, its anti-jihad force in the Sahel. bur-lal/ri/dl
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